Does Your Structured Cabling Need Some Structure?

Is your comms cabinet putting your network at risk?

Poor cabling is one of the most common problems our engineers encounter in the comms cabinet of many businesses they visit. In most workplaces this is just the norm and no questions are asked, until a problem arises and troubleshooting is next to impossible without first re-organising an untidy cable job which is often the root of the problem.

We asked Dave Barnes, our expert in structured comms networks to outline the most common problems that can arise

Downtime – Probably the biggest threat to your business, but if one of those lose hanging wires gets accidentally pulled out or loosened, one of your business critical services could go down and cost you time and money as well as the time spent identifying the problem when there is no organisation to the cables

Health & Safety – As you can see from the ‘before’ image below, as well as messy cabling, there are multiple extension leads and sockets being used to power everything. The mix of power sources creates a high fire risk

Cost – You can cut the cost of adds/moves/changes by have a tidy, efficient comms cabinet as well as any time spent working on it. By maintaining a well organised infrastructure you will be saving money and time in the long term. It is often assumed that the issue is with the phone system when upon further inspection it is in fact the cabling. It is a lot easier for a technician to find his way around a clean network that’s also marked up.

Dave gave us some examples:

This project required a new comms cabinet, from the image it’s visible that the old one was full beyond capacity. To accommodate future scalability the old cabinet was replaced with a new taller and slightly wider one. Dave worked outside of business hours to document and label all the cabling, colour code cables for each service e.g. red for data, blue for voice, etc., replaced untidy cables with shorter length, tidied cables and mapped everything efficiently. A network diagram identified what each cable was for and what colour was associated with what service.

Below is an even more striking example of a similar project Dave worked on.

Why not request a no obligation, no cost survey and get Dave out to look at your network? Contact Us or call 01 2541800